RNP Chapter 51 Echoes
Chapter 51 Echoes
The ramp was longer than Liu En had anticipated.
Every few dozen meters there's a bend, the curves not natural—the marks left by engineering machinery cutting through the rock. Occasionally, the expeditionary force's engineering markings flash across the walls: low-Gothic numbers, warning arrows, the weathered outline of the Imperial double-headed eagle. The deeper you go, the fewer the markings. They're replaced by another script, more rounded, with connected strokes. The Tau's writing system. This passage wasn't dug by the expeditionary force; it was rebuilt on the original site. The Tau's laboratory lies below.
Liu En's consciousness stretched forward. At the end of the ramp was a hollow cavity, its outline irregular, where underground passages from several directions converged. Scattered on the ground were collapsed support pillars and broken baseboards, while the walls bore electrical cabinets and access panels with inscriptions in the Titanium Tribe script. There were no lights, only the searchlights of his power armor illuminating the way ahead.
Nothing could be received on the communication channel. It wasn't noise; it was complete silence. The Black Pearl's carrier wave had disappeared, and only two or three out of ten confirmation pulses from the machine gunners could be received.
The planet's natural electromagnetic environment shouldn't be like this. The atmosphere is thin, geological activity is minimal, and the sensors in orbit are scanning normally. But at this moment, the intensity of the interference far exceeds any natural phenomenon—not physical shielding, but something much deeper. Liu En's Thinker interface detected a low-frequency, structured noise, not random electromagnetic radiation, but a data stream. It filled the entire frequency band, like a layer of conscious silt, enveloping all signals trying to penetrate the rock. It was actively listening, blocking, and mimicking.
Kara's voice came through the garrison channel, broken and intermittent. "...Captain...they're still chasing...their numbers...are increasing..."
"Keep going." Liu En didn't turn around.
But suddenly, an unexpected sound interrupted the garrison's channel—not Kara's, not any veteran's, but a low, structured binary pulse, repeating fragments of the identity verification instructions from the Black Pearl's last call. It came from deep underground, from the end of the ramp.
Liu En shut down the receiving channel of the team channel. The pulse was still there, but it had become lower and farther away, like a needle stuck in the crevice of the skull.
The ramp ended. The passage widened abruptly, the rock walls on either side replaced by prefabricated panels from the Titanium Tribe, a grayish-white composite material with burn marks and cracks on the surface. The ground was covered with non-slip metal grating, deformed by the weight of gravel. The overhead lights were long gone. As the searchlight swept across the walls, signs in Titanium Tribe script could be seen—Research Lab, Power Plant, Archives, Weapons Testing Range.
Liu En stood at the crossroads. Three paths branched off. His consciousness extended to the farthest point—at the end of the left passage, there was a heat source, moving. There was one on the right, but with a much lower density. Directly ahead, at the end of the largest passage, was that extremely low-frequency pulsation.
"Straight ahead." He took a step.
The density of unmanned sentries had increased several times over. But like the patchwork structures on the surface, the defensive units here were a crudely made ragtag army. Some mechs had different types of armor plates welded onto them, and some had weapon interfaces that were clearly incompatible, held together by crude adapters. Their gait was uncoordinated, their cooperation chaotic, relying entirely on sheer numbers. Live ammunition and lasers fired alternately, bullets and beams slamming densely onto the Casterland mechs leading the way.
They were the targets most heavily armed. Their massive bodies absorbed the majority of the firepower, and the repulsive mesh activated almost continuously under the relentless bombardment. Each hit was accompanied by a crisp crack of electricity, and tiny sparks flew from the mesh nodes, forming a shimmering curtain of light in the dim passage. Laser beams were deflected and scattered, and live ammunition was deflected, sending debris flying against the rock walls surrounding the mechs. Their armored surfaces were covered with scorch marks and craters, but not one stopped, not one fell.
Carlos, dragging his injured leg, retreated behind a support pillar, leaned out, and fired two shots, smashing a heavy unit that had just charged out. A second one rushed in from the other side. Kara fired a shot into the torso of that machine—a plasma pistol, one shot, one kill.
The mechs' signals came and went intermittently through the garrison's channel. Several mechs suddenly froze, their bodies trembling, their laser arrays scanning aimlessly. The repulsive grid fluctuated abnormally, and the humming of energy feedback came and went.
Kara shouted into the channel, "Attention! The mechs have stopped!"
The disabled mechs weren't far from Liu En; the area of effect, with a radius of about twenty meters, was just enough to cover them. His consciousness probed into the core of the wet component. The injected forged command packets, blocked data, and fragments mimicking pulses were all stripped away and cleared at the atomic level. A few seconds later, the mech twitched, its optical lens refocused, and the repulsive grid resumed its stable low-frequency hum. It emitted a short binary confirmation pulse and stood up again.
Kara watched this scene, her lips moved slightly, but she didn't ask. She didn't know what the captain had done, but she knew the mechs were moving again. That was enough.
The team continued advancing. The number of unmanned sentries dwindled. The iconic features of the TNT laboratory appeared on both sides of the corridor—observation windows, sealed hatches, and equipment cabinets. Some hatches were open, their interiors empty; others were closed, their seals intact.
At the end of the passage was a door. Not a sliding, airtight door like those of the Tau, but one installed by the expeditionary force—a heavy, adamantite-reinforced door, etched with the Imperial double-headed eagle emblem and a warning in Low Gothic: "Danger Zone. Authorized Personnel Only." The door wasn't fully closed, leaving a crack through which a faint blue-white light shone.
Liu En pushed open the door.
Behind the door was a vast domed space. The dome was over a hundred meters high and more than five hundred meters in diameter. Titanium-based lights were embedded in the walls, emitting a cool, bluish-white light. The brightness had been reduced to about one-tenth of its normal value, but it was still shining.
In the center of the dome, he did not see the prototype's outer shell, which he had expected to be buried under the pile of rubble.
The prototype—the Dead Core—has been dug out of the rubble.
Not everything was dug out, only the portion sufficient to keep it "alive." Around it lay a jumble of equipment dragged from the rubble: power modules, cooling systems, data storage units, communication arrays. Cables converged on the core from all directions, like a massive, tangled mass of metal roots. Some interfaces were clearly incompatible, some power modules were different models with inconsistent output parameters, yet they were all forcibly connected to the same power bus.
Throughout the entire dome, there is only this incomplete AI and the "life support system" it has pieced together for itself.
It wasn't repaired. It dug itself out of the rubble. Little by little, over thousands of years.
Liu En's consciousness swept over the machine. Energy readings were far below design values, most logic units were offline, and the self-test program repeatedly reported errors. But its data ports were still transmitting something—not standby signals, but structured, purposeful streams of data. Wideband binary pulses covered the entire electromagnetic spectrum. It was constantly sending out simulated commands, blocking signals, and something akin to a "call."
That "imitation" wasn't a program malfunction. It was because this AI, in its millennia of isolation, had learned the only way to communicate with the outside world—copying, repeating, forging. It lacked self-awareness, or rather, its self-awareness had been distorted into a kind of echo by the whispers of the subspace. It listened, imitated, injected, and blocked.
Kara glanced at him sideways and spat out the sand in her mouth. "This is it?"
"Um."
"Emperors are like piles of scrap metal on graves." She patted the butt of her gun.
Liu En did not respond.
Kara paused for two seconds, then turned and glanced at the still-smoking mechs behind her. "Should we go out?"
"Get out," Liu En said. "This thing is too dangerous. You're not safe here. The data contamination is too severe."
Kara didn't ask any further questions. She turned and ordered the veterans to put away their weapons and withdraw from the dome. The mechs also retreated outside the door, establishing a defensive line in the passageway. The door closed.
Liu En stood alone at the edge of the tangled mess of cables. The field expanded, its radius of over twenty meters covering most of the core machine.
The first step, upon reaching consciousness, is not decomposition, but perception. The computing power of this thing has decayed to less than one percent of its design value, with most logical units offline. But within that pile of self-growing "disordered fragments," there is a certain structure. It's not an algorithm, not code, but a purposeful remnant existing somewhere between data and will. It mimicked the Black Pearl's communication commands, injected forged control packets into the mechs, and repeated fragments of Liu En's voice in the garrison's channel.
It is the echo that grew out of the ruins of its own logic after this AI was touched by the whispers of the subspace during its long period of solitude.
Liu En didn't touch that part. What he needed was the hardware architecture—the decision-making framework composed entirely of solid-state logic gates.
The decomposition instruction is issued. The core processor is transformed into an atomic cloud at the atomic level and floods into the repository. Architecture, logic gate arrangement, decision tree branching model, parallel bus topology—all are completely archived in consciousness.
The "echo" briefly screamed at the moment the processor disintegrated—not a sound, but a repetitive, regular error code that suddenly appeared in the binary pulse, and then dissipated.
The background noise in the communication channel changed from complete silence to intermittent hissing.
Liu En stood there, silent for a few seconds. He hadn't created anything. It wasn't necessary. The real gain was already in his mind. That physical core no longer existed.
He turned and walked to the door, pushing open the reinforced gold door.
Kara waited outside the door. She glanced at Liu En's empty hands, and her eyebrows twitched.
"Where are the things?"
"Destroyed. Too dangerous to take out. The technical data has been archived. That's enough."
Kara glanced at him but didn't ask any more questions. She had just witnessed how the captain repaired the mechanized infantry and knew that some methods were beyond her comprehension.
"withdraw."
The team advanced towards the ground. The unmanned sentries in the tunnel were still there, but they were unresponsive—the main control core was gone, and the background noise was decreasing. Some stood blankly in place, some circled around, and some simply shut down and lay down.
On the ground. The transport ship remained in place. Only the static crackling of electricity could be heard on the communication channel.
Liu En pressed the communication button. "Black Pearl, mission complete, requesting return."
Marcus's voice broke through the noise and was clear this time. "Roger that. Welcome back."
Liu En boarded the transport ship and fastened his seatbelt. The field shield status light switched from yellow back to green, and the cooling system was still running.
The hatch closed. The transport ship ascended into the gray-yellow sky. In the distance, the silhouette of the Black Pearl was faintly visible in the orbital lights.